Save the date

Next Gala

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Speaker:Guest from Haiti

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Date: 23 March 2019, 17:00 pm

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Location:Menlo Park, CA

Mark your calendar now! Share the joy! Join us for an evening of friends, festivity, fine wine and fabulous food along with live entertainment and plenty of inspiration. Consider becoming a sponsor. Click on More Details to purchase tickets and sponsorship options.

Our Impact

Seeds for Future Generations

Giving back is an important part of leadership and a desire we instill in every MBB Scholar. In South Sudan, our scholars give back to their communities in many ways: they visit prisoners, help disabled adults in their villages, and tutor younger students. They also come up with unique, inspiring ways to pay it forward. Three MBB Scholars studying at a high school located in a desert have initiated a tree-planting campaign to beautify their campus, provide shade, and improve the environment. The Scholars reached out to the United Nations and Windle Trust International to obtain donated seedlings, then motivated their entire senior class to participate in planting, watering and protecting the young trees. MBB salutes their leadership!

We focus on 3 goals

01.

Education

Even the most rudimentary education is out of reach for desperately poor girls and women. In South Sudan, parents send only their sons to school. In Haiti it is poverty, not marginalization, that keeps girls out of school. 90% of schools are private, requiring tuition that most families cannot afford. MBB provides a grant to the only all-girl primary school in the rural region where we work and has awarded over 160 high school scholarships to young women there.

02.

Economic Empowerment

MBB offers skills training classes to adult women in Haiti, and small business development training and loans to S.Sudanese women in refugee camps. These projects enable women to lift themselves out of extreme poverty through their own hard work. Sewing, catering, baking, making soap, operating a restaurant: all of these things, and more, bring revenue into cash-strapped families.

03.

Women Advocacy

We may take it for granted that women are equal to their fathers and husbands and sons. But this is not accepted everywhere. In all of the ways that MBB helps women and girls to learn, to connect and to lead, we affirm their human dignity. We equip them with leadership skills and confidence to use their voice and their talents in promoting basic human rights for all women and girls: Safety. Water. Shelter. Schooling. Decision-making. Employment. Voting.

MBB uses education, radio programs, annual leadership trainings, peer support and alumnae networking to advance the advocacy goals of the women and girls with whom we work.

2017 Opus Prize Laureate

Sr Marilyn Lacey, RSM

Founder, Mercy Beyond Borders

Sister Marilyn Lacey founded Mercy Beyond Borders in 2008 after a visit to South Sudan where she saw what she described as “by far the most devastated place” she’d ever experienced during her decades of work with refugees around the world. Mercy Beyond Borders brings hope to more than 1,400 woman and girls annually by providing educational, economic and empowerment opportunities where there are few options to escape extreme poverty.

Moriku overcame a terrible childhood and then, after being abandoned, she put herself through primary and secondary school by farming. She fought off loneliness and discouragement. She clung to her dream of becoming a nurse. MBB gave her that chance with a scholarship. Moriku (whose name means “I do not fear”) is now the school nurse for 600 girls at St Bakhita Primary School in South Sudan. She’s also their role model.

Love-Talia, an MBB high school Scholar, lives in the mountains of Haiti with her parents and grandfather. They grow vegetables and make charcoal for a living. She loves being in school. “Our only problem,” she says, “is that the roof leaks a lot whenever it rains.”

Dak’s great sorrow is that when her village was attacked and her family killed, “I could not hold my dead children in my arms.” She fled and eventually landed in a refugee camp in Uganda. There, to her horror, she saw the enemy tribe who had murdered all she held precious. She was terrified, hiding in her hut day after day. Desperation prompted her to sign up for the MBB micro-loan program, even though it meant interacting with the tribe she feared. Now, she says, “We are living as friends. We share a business together. We eat together. We laugh together. It was MBB that brought us together.”

Uganda, Adjumani. South Sudan refugees in refugee camps. Pagirinya Camp. Consolate came to this camp in 2015 after a very difficult journey from South Sudan. With the help from a scholarship from the NGO Mercy Beyond Borders she has been able to attend St. Mary's School and is recognized as the smartest girl in the county. She boards at school but here in the camp helps at home and studies under challenging conditions She is from the Madi tribe and has five siblings.

Uganda, Adjumani. South Sudan refugees in refugee camps. Pagirinya Camp. Atapkwo Grace benefited from a Mercy Beyond Borders scholarship and studied to be a nurse. She currently works as a medical translator and treats pateints at the health center in the camps. With her friend and mentor, Agnes (left), another MBB scholar and school nurse.